NEW YORK — Trump administration officials on Monday blamed Mayor Eric Adams and New York City’s pro-immigrant laws for the shooting of an off-duty customs officer during an attempted robbery, and they warned that federal agents will flood the city in search of people who entered the United States illegally.
The 42-year-old officer was sitting with a friend in a Manhattan park late Saturday night when two men rode up on a scooter, police officials said. One of the men approached the officer and revealed a firearm, and when the officer realized he was being robbed, he drew his service weapon and the two men exchanged gunfire. Later that night, the police detained Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, 21, who had come from the Dominican Republic in 2023, as a person of interest in the shooting.
On Monday, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said during a news conference in New York that a second person, Cristian Aybar Berroa, had been detained in connection with the attack. Noem said that both men were immigrants from the Dominican Republic in the U.S. without legal permission, and police officials had said that Mora Nunez was wanted in connection with other violent crimes.
“When I look at what Mayor Adams has done to New York City, it breaks my heart to see the families that have suffered because of his policies,” Noem said. She accused Adams and mayors from other Democratic cities of “protecting criminals who go out and murder, rape, rob.”
Thomas Homan, President Donald Trump’s top border adviser, said that federal officials planned to ramp up immigrant detentions in New York and cities with so-called sanctuary policies, which usually prevent local law enforcement officers from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Homan had made the threat before, but it has since been buttressed by an infusion of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement efforts as part of Trump’s recently passed domestic policy law.
“Sanctuary cities are now our priority,” Homan said, adding that federal agents would “flood the zone.”
During a separate news conference, Adams, a Democrat who has criticized the city’s sanctuary laws, was asked about Noem’s comments, and he said that he was “extremely angry” about the shooting. Adams, who is running for reelection in November, blamed the court system and state bail laws.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has said there was no indication that the officer, whom the police have not identified, had been targeted because he worked for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. He is expected to recover from his injuries.
The city’s sanctuary laws, most of which were passed in 2014 when Bill de Blasio was mayor, strictly limit communications and cooperation between the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and city agencies, including the Police Department and the Department of Corrections.
Federal immigration officials have been especially frustrated by restrictions on whom the city will transfer from city jails to ICE custody. ICE routinely requests that local jails across the country transfer immigrants who are detained for crimes to federal custody so that they can be deported.
For ICE, the transfers are an easy way to apprehend immigrants the agency deems dangerous. But Democratic leaders in sanctuary cities such as New York have argued that the transfers lead to the deportation of people who have been accused but not convicted of crimes, and that localities should not be in the business of enforcing federal immigration laws.
In 2014, New York’s Democrat-led City Council passed laws to bar ICE from the city’s largest jail complex, on Rikers Island, and to sharply limit how jails and the police comply with transfer requests from ICE, which are known as detainer requests. Under the laws, a city agency will honor an ICE detainer request only if it is accompanied by a warrant signed by a judge and involves someone convicted of one of about 170 serious crimes, including rape and murder.
The laws led city agencies to stop honoring most ICE detainer requests, largely ending the practice of transferring immigrants without legal status to ICE custody in New York City, except in certain cases.
The Department of Homeland Security said that Aybar Berroa, the second man who was arrested in connection with Saturday’s shooting, entered the country illegally in June 2022 and was ordered deported by an immigration judge in January 2023. The agency said that Aybar Berroa had previously been arrested in New York on charges of reckless endangerment and larceny and that an ICE detainer for him had been ignored by the Adams administration.
City Hall did not immediately respond to questions about whether a detainer request had been issued for Aybar Berroa. But city officials reiterated Monday that the city would transfer people to ICE only if the agency provided a judicial warrant, adding that holding people in jail beyond their release date to allow ICE to pick them up was unconstitutional and could put the city at risk of litigation.
Last year, as crimes committed by migrants received intense news coverage, Adams became one of the few Democrats in New York to speak out against the sanctuary laws. He argued that the city’s inability to work with ICE threatened public safety, and he proposed changing the laws, but was resoundingly rejected by the City Council.
Adams began establishing a close relationship with top Trump officials, including Homan, to find areas of collaboration on immigration issues as he hoped that the Trump administration would drop federal corruption charges against him.
Unable to change the sanctuary laws without the City Council’s buy-in, the Adams administration issued an executive order to allow ICE back onto Rikers Island, a priority of Homan’s. But the order was temporarily blocked by a state judge after the City Council sued, frustrating the mayor and Homan.
On Monday, Homan said that ICE would deploy more agents across the city — exactly the approach that sanctuary cities don’t want, he said — because the agency could not access Rikers.
“We’ll have more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy,” Homan said, adding, “If we can’t arrest that bad guy safely and securely in the county jail, we’ll arrest him in the community.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times and was written by Ana Ley and Luis Ferré-Sadurní. Photos courtesy of Todd Heisler and Dakota Santiago. Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed to this article and reporting.
